…why is it that only Hindu practices and traditions are targeted for censure and ridicule? How is what Smriti Irani did more superstitious or unscientific than a Muslim kneeling to pray to a black stone in Mecca or a Catholic imbibing bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ?

Here, I’ll make Ms. Aditi Banerjee feel a little better: all of those practices are absurd, superstitious, ritualistic baloney.

“As you know, since the filing of the original incentive application in 2010, we have strongly supported this project, believing it to be a tourism attraction based on biblical themes that would create significant jobs for the community,” wrote Stewart in a letter to Ark Encounter’s attorney. “However, based on various postings on the Answers in Genesis (AIG) and Ark Encounter websites, reports from Ark Encounter investor meetings and our correspondence, it is readily apparent that the project has evolved from a tourism attraction to an extension of AIG’s ministry that will no longer permit the Commonwealth to grant the project tourism development incentives.”

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It vexes me. The official definition says the Bible Belt is the deep South, but that makes no sense. Dwight Moody, of the influential Moody Bible College, was from Massachusetts. William Riley, the pastor who invented fundamentalism, was from…Minneapolis. Saddleback Church is in Orange County. New Saint Andrews College and Doug Wilson are in Idaho; Mars Hill, before its founder’s meltdown, was based in Seattle. The burned over district? New York.

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Every time I hear these stories, I’m horrified: parents who are so besotted with their dumb-ass religion, that they watch and pray and do nothing more as their children die of easily treated diseases. Type I diabetes symptoms go away with a shot of insulin; appendicitis can be quickly treated with a simple surgery; food poisoning leads to vomiting leads to a ruptured esophagus leads to painful death; childhood cancers are not so easily treatable, but dying slowly of blossoming tumors strangling your organs, without even so much as palliative care, is a misery. But the parents watch, and are no doubt suffering themselves, but the suffering of their children is less important to them than doubting the power of their nonexistent god to cure them. Strangely, never in the history of the world has a god magically intervened to make a cancer disappear, or an acute infection to vanish, or diabetes to simply go away.

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The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, explains that good ol’ polytheistic Hinduism is fully compatible with science, just like the Pope finds Catholicism compatible with evolution.

We can feel proud of what our country achieved in medical science at one point of time, the prime minister told a gathering of doctors and other professionals at a hospital in Mumbai on Saturday. We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realise that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb.

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He’s the Pope; you know he’s not going to defy his dogma to be honest with you. He doesn’t support gay marriage, either, but is good at giving the impression of tolerance, which will then be ‘clarified’ by Vatican spokesmen. Same here. Lots of people are telling me that the Pope says Christians should believe in evolution and Big Bang, but no, he actually isn’t. He’s telling you to believe in the Catholic Church’s weird-ass wink-wink-nudge-nudge version of evolution.